


Bruised, But Not Broken

by captainamergirl



Category: General Hospital
Genre: F/M, Soulmate AU, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-23
Updated: 2018-10-23
Packaged: 2019-08-06 11:19:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16386851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainamergirl/pseuds/captainamergirl
Summary: A soulmate AU where Luke and Laura feel each other's pain. One shot.





	Bruised, But Not Broken

**Bruised, But Not Broken**   
  
He was thirteen when she entered the world. It happened as he had stood in the Spencer family kitchen with the cluttered countertops and scuffed, yellowed linoleum flooring, shoveling stale fruity cereal into his thin-lipped mouth. He'd almost choked on his unsatisfying breakfast. His lungs became wet and cobwebby, and his eyes burned, assaulted by the light streaming in through the grimy, dusty blinds. He felt light-headed and weak. He understood instinctively what it meant.   
  
He had been waiting years for that moment.   
  
She was here! She was finally here. He had begun to think he truly was the freak his dad had always told him he was -- the one person in all of the world who didn't have a soulmate of their own. Everyone else at his junior high school was already aware of theirs; some had even already met their better halves. He'd almost given up hope; had almost stopped believing anybody in the whole world would ever care about him, but somehow he knew  _She_ would. He instantly loved the nameless, faceless girl. It was a brotherly affection right then, but he knew someday it would grow into something completely different... Something amazing.   
  
***   
  
He was fourteen when he woke up on the cold, hard, stained tile floor in the bathroom. His blonde hair was matted with blood, his head throbbed, and his nose was very likely broken. His father had taken after him again for letting his dog Skip relieve himself on the ratty old rug in the den. It had been the most brutal assault at his father's hands yet, and he'd only taken it so his dog wouldn't have to. Now he regretted it simply because he knew what it meant. Somewhere out in the world, a tiny toddler, was experiencing this very same agonizing pain. Pain and confusion that she, at her tender young age, couldn't have begun to understand.   
  
Tears streamed from his eyes. He hadn't cried in years, but he couldn't stop them. Fat teardrops wet his face as he pulled himself to a sitting position. He immediately clutched at his side, howling in pain and indignation. His ribs. Oh damn, his ribs! Were they broken, just like his face? Had old man Spencer broken his ribs and his soulmate's too in the process?   
  
Luke had never been angrier; had never been more disgusted with the bastard he called a father. In that moment, he understood rage -- white-hot, homicidal rage. He wanted to go after Tim with the same baseball bat the man had earlier turned on him. Luke liked to think he would have beaten Tim into a coma if the louse had actually been there, but Luke's parents were both suspiciously absent.   
  
Luke bandaged himself up as best as he could with the cheap first aid kit in the cabinet, and then moved to his bedroom, the one so tiny he could barely turn around in it. He threw everything that could fit into an old, metal-gray duffel bag. He snapped a leash on Skip who had been cowering in the corner, and moved down the hall to his little sister's room.   
  
"Barbara Jean," he said, poking his head in the door. She was curled up under her faded pink covers in a fetal position, hands pressed over her ears. He could see her shoulders as they heaved with each breathless sob. She'd no doubt heard the whole knock-down-drag-out fight as it happened. She was so petite and far too young to have broken it up. Luke was very glad she hadn't tried.   
  
He moved to her, offered her a smile with his blood-crusted teeth, even as thought vaguely that he should have taken a moment to brush them. "Barbara Jean," Luke said. "You, me, and Skip... We're gonna get out of here, okay? We're leaving now. We'll go so far and so fast that Dad can never find us."   
  
Bobbie turned over in bed, took one look at him, and really began to sob in earnest. He offered her a weak smile. "Hey now. Come on, Barbara Jean. I don't look that bad, do I?"   
  
Truthfully, he knew he looked worse. He felt like crap too. The urgency to get the hell out of dodge while he was still alive was stronger than anything though and propelled him forward. His soulmate ... She didn't deserve this kind of punishment. Maybe he did - maybe he deserved all of the pain and misery and heartache that was doled out to him - but she didn't. She was innocent. He just instinctively knew that about her. He was running away for her. He needed to protect her.   
  
It took a good hour to coax her out of bed, but finally Bobbie agreed to run away with him, and only really because he had begged her to, pleaded with her, pointed out that next time Tim would surely kill him and maybe her afterwards. What he was really afraid of was that his soulmate, wherever she was, tiny as she would likely be, would suffer the same fate.   
  
"I'm sorry, girl," he whispered to his soulmate in the cool night air as he, his sister, and their scruffy dog ran for the safety of the nearest bus station. "I'll make this up to you someday."   
  
****   
  
He was eighteen and working as a handyman in a dilapidated apartment building when he felt her pain again. A sharp pain stabbed at his knee and when he looked down, the knobby thing was dripping with blood. It panicked him a bit, but he tried to tell himself that she'd likely just fallen off her bike or something and scuffed her knee. Kids did that sort of thing all the time.   
  
Honestly, he was just glad to be able to feel her pain again at all. He hadn't felt anything but sadness since the day Tim almost took his life. He'd quietly feared that she was gone forever; that she hadn't survived the beating Luke had taken, but this ache in his leg told him differently. She was alive!   
  
He smiled the rest of the day thereafter, and when Bobbie asked him at dinner what he was so happy about, he simply replied, "That's for me to know, and for you to forever wonder about." He ruffled her bright red hair as she shrieked in indignation.   
  
Life was far from easy. They had to constantly look over their shoulders, move from town to town like wayward gypsies, to keep their father from catching up to them, but hell, it was all worth it because he knew he wasn't completely alone in the world anymore. His girl was out there somewhere. Someday, someway, he was going to find her.   
  
xoxox   
  
He was nearly thirty-five when he finally met her. His girl, his soulmate, the one person in all of the world he was meant to be with. Of course, he didn't know it was her at first. He only knew her name was Laura and that she was the prettiest young thing he'd ever seen in his life. He felt a little guilty, knowing how much he wanted her when she couldn't be The One because she was already saddled to that S.O.B. Scotty Baldwin. He felt as if he was cheating on his soulmate somehow, wanting Laura as much as he did.   
  
He stood at the cash register of The Campus Disco one night, eyelashes lowered as he feigned not noticing Laura scurrying about the place, serving drinks and peanuts to the rowdy customers. Laura was so entranced in her work that she never saw the big, burly, three-hundred pound muscle man walking in her direction. She backed up right into him and he shoved her roughly aside in annoyance. The tray of beer bottles in her arms went flying across the room. She hit the floor hard on her knees. Luke wanted to wallop the guy but instead ran to Laura's side, even as he felt a sharp stabbing sensation in his cheek and burning pain in each of his legs.   
  
He helped Laura to her feet as he shouted at the fat man to watch where the hell he was going. Luke drew Laura close to him; holding her maybe just a smidgen too possessively. A shard of glass was burrowed in her pale cheek. Blood dripped from the point of it, and Luke wanted to pull it free, but didn't dare, afraid to touch her and hurt her -- that beautiful, porcelain creature from all of his fantasies.   
  
Laura stared up at him in surprise. "Luke," she said, "I'm fine but... but you -- you're bleeding."   
  
He almost didn't hear her. He was too entranced by the concern that showed for him in her cornflower blue eyes.  _"Huh?"_   
  
"Your cheek, Luke. Your right cheek; it's all bloody... Just like mine."   
  
"What?" He found his face with the pads of his fingers and winced as he touched the tender, shredded skin beneath his eye. "Well, sure enough."   
  
He looked at Laura as his fingers came away sticky with crimson. "Laura," he whispered. "Do you know what this means?"   
  
"I - I think so," she whispered back. "It means we're -"   
  
"We're soulmates, Laura, we're soulmates!" Luke crowed. Without hesitation, he swept her up into his arms and spun her around, and around, and around.   
  
"Luke! Luke!" She cried. "Put me down. My head is spinning."   
  
"Mine is too! Isn't it the most delicious feeling in the world?"   
  
"You're crazy, Luke Spencer!"   
  
"Crazy for you," he said. "Just out and out insanely, head-over-feet crazy sprung for you... My soulmate. I really like saying that. God, I never thought we'd meet."   
  
"Oh, but Luke, what about Scotty?" Laura asked. He stiffened and his hands started to shake where they gripped her tiny waist. He promptly set her down on her own two feet, careful not to drop her.   
  
"What about Scotty?" Luke spat. "That slimeball needs to  _go away!"_   
  
"Luke-"   
  
"Laura, come on! I've waited over thirty years for you to show up. That's three long decades in which I tried my damnedest to keep myself away from other women so I could be true to you. I was practically a monk, Laura.  _A monk!_ Celibacy went against every fiber of my being."   
  
Laura sighed. "And I ... I guess I wasn't so true to you, was I? I've dated Scott since practically from the first moment we met."   
  
"But you had to know... You had to know he wasn't The One, Laura. Deep down inside..."   
  
"Oh, I knew ..."   
  
"Then why would you decide to be with that big lug anyway? Why not wait for me, Laura?"   
  
"I guess... I was just lonely. Scotty was the first person to show me any real kindness when I came to this town. He was so good to me, and I suppose I felt I owed it to him to try things out."   
  
"Well surely now that you know I'm your guy, you're going to dump him."   
  
"I don't want to hurt him, Luke."   
  
"But you are hurting  _me,_ Laura. It's like you stabbed a knife right smack-dab into the center of my chest... Don't you feel that, Laura? Don't you feel that aching pain inside of you too?"   
  
Laura nodded. Her eyes shimmered with unshed tears. "I do, Luke. Of course I do."   
  
"Scotty ... He'll be fine, Laura. Hard as it to for me to believe he could be compatible with anyone on God's green earth, I know he's got to have a soulmate out there somewhere too. He owes it to himself to go find them."   
  
"And I suppose I owe it to you to let him go."   
  
"No, you owe it to  _yourself,_ Laura. I am never going to feel complete without you... And can you honestly say you're going to feel complete without me?"   
  
Laura shook her head slowly. "No, no, Luke, I'm not. You're right. We do owe it to ourselves to try things. We do. I'll just have to let Scotty down easy."   
  
"Good."   
  
Laura smiled softly. "In the meantime, I suppose we'd better get ourselves all cleaned up. We both look a fright with blood all over our faces."   
  
"Nah, you're as beautiful as you've always been."   
  
"Luke," she blushed, "don't flatter me."   
  
"Can't help it, babe. I call 'em as I see 'em."   
  
xoxox   
  
Luke was forty, three weeks shy of his birthday, when Laura went into labor on a stormy autumn evening. The pain he felt was blinding. Intense and ferocious, like nothing he'd really ever encountered before. As he clutched his wife's hand in the delivery room, he asked her how she did it; how she could stand the pain ripping through her body.   
  
"I have to withstand it, Luke, and so do you," Laura said gently. Her face was shiny with sweat. "Our baby needs to come into the world now so he can grow up one day to meet his soulmate, just like we did."   
  
Luke smiled in spite of himself and knocked a little kiss to her damp forehead. The doctor told her to  _push, push, push!,_ and then a loud cry split the expectant silence of the room. Luke almost wept with relief and joy as he cut the umbilical cord and held his child for the first time. He was a strapping, handsome boy.   
  
Luke settled the large infant into Laura's waiting arms. "What'll we call him, Laura?" He asked.   
  
"Lucas," Laura said with no hesitation. "After his father.  _Lucas Lorenzo Spencer."_  
  
"Ahh now. Why do you want to go and curse the kid like that?"   
  
"I am not cursing him. I am actually  _blessing_ him. He's truly lucky to have you for his father."   
  
"Lucky," Luke mused.  _"Lucky._ That's what I'll call him -- Lucky Spencer, my little cowboy."   
  
Laura smiled and gingerly touched the baby's soft, pink cheek. "Lucky... It's perfect."   
  
Luke grinned. "Hey, can I ask you something?"   
  
"Of course you can."   
  
"Can we wait awhile before we make another baby?" He asked. "Good-looking as this kid is, I'm not sure  _I_ can take that kind of pain again anytime soon."   
  
Laura giggled. "You, Luke Spencer, are incorrigible... but then, I wouldn't have it any other way... I am so glad you came into my life."   
  
"It was fate, baby... Fate that'd you end up saving me from my self."   
  
Laura reached up to palm his cheek. "You saved me too, in so many, many ways. I am glad we have this baby together. I am glad we have  _each other."_   
  
Luke nodded. "You know what, Laura? Me too.  _Me too."_   
  
**THE END**


End file.
